$530 buy-in for a $5,300 seat. 21 spots, 22 place gets $4,200. We have 24 players left. Play is 6 handed.
The villain has the biggest stack in the tournament. He has been open shoving about 60% of hands preflop. Avg. stack is 800K, Hero just doubled up to 750K.

There is one short stack of 250K, next shortest stack is 550K and there are a few stacks around that level.

we are at 22.5K/45K/ w/ 5.15K ante

Preflop Hero has KK in the BB
Villain Opens shoves for 4 million,
all fold to hero and we?

The problem in this spot is that we aren't going to really get much of a chance to steal blinds here. SB has the 2nd biggest stack of the field at 2.5M.

Given you have almost an average stack (likely ranking about 12 of 24) and the blinds are about to move through you, a large % of the time you could fold. It's a satellite so surviving the bubble is all that matters and you're more likely to make the money folding vs. the 18% of times you lose vs any hand. And consider if V has any A, KK loses 33% of the time.

A bit rusty on satellite strategy but this seems like a clear fold. 2 questions:

1. I think we want to fold AA here too, agree?

2. These stacks seem really deep. Only 1 player is below 10 BBs approaching the bubble! Does this imply that the field was mixing it up too much, and thus was a pretty soft one?

1. Interesting question - the math says to fold (15%-22% of the time AA loses) while an average stack should be cashing more often (say ~90% of the time). That said, I know a lot of players who would insta call but would complain about the bad beat if they lost not realizing how often AA should be losing in this spot.

2. Interesting hypothesis - read one stack at 5.5BBs, several around 12BBs, one at 89BB, one at 56BBs, Hero at 17BBs and overall average at 18BBs so could imagine a distribution of: 1x5.5BBs; 4x12BBs; 16x14BBs (avg); Herox17BBs; SBx56BBs; UTGx89BBs. Which like I said earlier more than likely puts Hero ranking in the middle (or even upper middle) meaning he should cash around 90% of the time (22 paid out of 24). Doesn't seem extraordinarily deep to me at an average of 18BBs in a $530 sat BI but I haven't played this sat so don't know the structure.